Maybe you’ve resisted getting into AMC’s zombie melodrama The Walking Dead but your friends have finally worn you down. Or maybe your long-term memory for television is lacking. Either way, the network believes the best way to prepare for the season premiere on Sunday, October 23, is to listen to John Cleese narrate a quick recap of the previous six seasons.

The video is intended mainly for UK viewers, which is why it suggests the debut date is October 24 and why Mr. Cleese refers to something called an “Ofsted inspection.” That’s the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. There are also a couple mentions of “bezzie” and “boffing,” which you can look up yourself.

If you’re wondering whether Cleese is a genuine admirer of the show or just a voice for hire, it sounds like the former. “I can’t get enough of The Walking Dead,” he told Newsweek. “The beautiful scenery, the emotional depths of the characters and, most of all, the gentle sprinkling of horrific barbarism.”

[h/t /Film]

While love may be blind in some respects, your five senses actually play an important role in determining who you perceive to be a suitable partner—whether you realize it or not. Here are just some of the subtle ways sensory experiences play a role in your dating life:

1. THE EYES ARE THE WINDOWS TO THE SOUL.

A number of studies indicate that eye contact is vital to social encounters. One brain-scan study found that when people held sustained eye contact, they began to blink simultaneously, and after a while, their brain activity actually synced up. These long gazes can make people feel more attracted to one another. A set of 1989 studies found that after strangers stared into each other’s eyes for two full minutes, they reported an increase in feelings of passionate love.

Eye contact also signals that the person could reciprocate your affections. Another study found that people are more attracted to faces that are looking directly at them and (crucially) smiling. “Collectively, our findings indicate that attraction is influenced not only by physical beauty, but also by the extent to which a person appears open to engaging the observer,” the researchers wrote in 2006.

Though most research on the science of romance tends to focus on heterosexual pairs, studies have found that LGBT people also reveal some subconscious sexual feelings with their eyes. A 2012 study found that men’s pupils dilated in response to images they found sexy. Straight men’s eyes dilated in response to a sexy video of a woman, gay men’s eyes dilated in response to a sexy video of a man, and bisexual men’s eyes dilated in response to both. (But to make things more complicated, straight women’s eyes dilated in response to videos of both men and women, despite their reported feelings of arousal.)

2. THE NOSE KNOWS BEST.

Smell plays an important role in attraction, though it may not always be obvious. Though the research isn’t entirely clear-cut, there’s evidence to suggest that people subconsciously use smell to ferret out appropriate mates.

Famously, researchers have tested volunteers’ attraction to the scents of potential partners by having them smell dirty t-shirts that have been worn by someone of the opposite sex. Several versions of this type of study [PDF] have found that women tend to prefer the smell of sweat from men whose immune systems genetically differ from their own. In theory, this would be evolutionarily beneficial, because it would prevent mating between relatives and increase the chances that their children would have strong immune systems.

Other studies have linked pheromones to sexual orientation and gender perception. One found that gay men’s brains react to testosterone from male sweat as a sexual pheromone, while they smelled estrogen derived from women’s urine as a normal odor. Another study, in 2014, found that when people attracted to men (straight women and gay men) smelled cloves laced with a testosterone derivative, they perceived the gender presentation of a simulated person walking toward them as masculine. In turn, when straight men smelled an estrogen derivative, they perceived the person’s gender presentation as feminine.

3. TOUCH IS HEALTHY, AND PERSUASIVE.

Romantic touch isn’t the same as other tactile sensations. According to one brain-scanning study, when people think about touching a romantic partner, it activates a different part of the brain than thinking about touching an inanimate object would. The researchers found that this brain activity correlated with the degree of passionate love the partners reported on a survey.

And in the right context, a light touch can be quite persuasive. A 2007 study found that when a man touched a woman’s arm lightly while asking her to dance, she was more likely to say yes. Other research has found that touch increases the brain’s response to an emotional situation. “Such enhanced processing may then, among others, boost empathy and increase the likelihood that the touch recipient acts in favor of the toucher,” the researchers wrote in 2011.

In the context of love, though, touch can be more than just pleasurable. Touching a romantic partner may help protect you against stressors. Some research has found associations between hugging a long-term lover and lower blood pressure [PDF]. In one 2003 study, people who held hands and hugged their live-in partner before a stressful event (public speaking) exhibited fewer physiological signs of stress, including lower blood pressure and heart rate, compared to people who rested quietly before the public speaking task. A 2007 study specifically looking at women’s stress responses found the same result.

4. YOUR VOICE CAN REVEAL YOUR ATTRACTIVENESS.

A 2004 study found that your voice may carry some information about your sex life. Researchers asked volunteers to listen to anonymous recorded voices and rate their attractiveness, then compared those ratings to survey information about the speakers. They found that, among other things, people with attractive voices tended to have more sexual partners than people with unattractive voices. So maybe the attractiveness of your voice does indeed correlate with whether you’ve got game.

Another study from 2014 found that people change their voices when speaking to someone they find attractive. The study looked at people speaking both English and Czech. Men’s voices varied more in pitch and went lower when they were speaking to a woman they were attracted to than someone they weren’t attracted to.

5. LOVE IS SWEET.

Kissing isn’t an entirely universal human activity, but it is a popular one. While its exact purpose isn’t clear, some researchers suggest that it might be about taste-testing “gustatory cues found in skin oils and saliva compounds,” as one study puts it.

You actually share a lot of information about your immune system when you swap spit. In 2014, Dutch researchers brought 21 couples into the lab and had them make out. They took saliva samples from everyone before and after they kissed to test how oral bacteria might play a role in attraction and love, and in between kisses, they gave one partner a probiotic yogurt drink to test how much bacteria is swapped when people make out. They estimated that as much as 80 million bacteria are swapped between a couple in 10 seconds of kissing. They also found that couples had oral microbiomes that were more similar to one another’s than the microbiota of unrelated people, and the more they kissed, the more similar their bacterial colonies were.

And if your partner’s spit tastes sweet to you, you might just like them more. It seems that sweet tastes prime you for love—one study found that people who ate sweets in the lab were more likely to express interest in a hypothetical relationship [PDF].

Anyone who’s ever worked in an office can tell you that liking your cubicle-mates can make going to work a significantly more enjoyable experience, but new research says identifying with and feeling a strong connection to the people you work with has actually been shown to improve your overall health and sense of well-being. According to an international meta-analysis of 58 studies involving more than 19,000 people published in the academic journal Personality and Social Psychology Review, feeling like you and your colleagues are on the same team, and, maybe more importantly, feeling like your colleagues feel the same way, isn’t just good for workplace productivity, it’s good for workers’ mental and physiological states, too.

Niklas Steffens, the analysis’s University of Queensland-based lead researcher, says his team’s key findings suggest that when people are particularly invested in their social relationships at work, there’s more evidence of health benefits and lower levels of burnout.

“When we identify with our workgroup and organization, this provides us with a sense of ‘we-ness’— which is a basis for a sense of belonging, agency and social support, and a sense of meaning and purpose,” Steffens told mental_floss in an email.

To make their conclusions, Steffens and his team (which included researchers from China, Germany, and Norway as well as Australia) carefully reviewed dozens of previous studies from the past two decades that examined the relationship between group social identification and health within organizations. Overall, the team found that workplaces that allow workers to feel “at home” and that facilitate lower-level workgroups that employees can identify with socially are the most likely to create a workforce that feels invigorated instead of burned out. This kind of staff in turn tends to be more successful and satisfied with their work, and less likely to experience physical symptoms like back problems or poor cortisol levels. The sharing aspect, or knowing that fellow colleagues also feel the same sense of office unity, is particularly important, the research showed.

Surprisingly, the analysis found that these benefits tend to be stronger when more of the participants in the studies were men, a counterintuitive piece of information considering women tend to have stronger social networks. Steffens and his team hypothesized that this might be because many workplaces are still stereotypically masculine, leaving women to feel left out of the organization’s inner circle.

Another area the study points out may need more examination is how much of an impact it can have when an employee actively distances him or herself from an office social group. “It is conceivable,” the study says, “that increasing levels of disidentification … are more strongly related to the presence of unease, discomfort, and stress than to the absence of ease, comfort, and well-being.”

Josselyne Herman Saccio, a communication expert who was not involved in the study, but who leads seminars for personal and professional growth firm Landmark, says that feeling of “we-ness” among office social groups can also feed a poor mental state if those groups indulge in negative behaviors like complaining and gossip.

“When you’re in complaint mode at work and other people agree with you, you end up getting stuck,” Saccio said. The beefs you have seem more real, she said, when others you identify with reinforce them. This can lead to bad feelings, poor work performance, and burnout as you internalize each complaint. Instead, Saccio recommends reframing complaints in the form of requests so things actually get done and channeling that social connection with colleagues through a more positive filter. Talking with work friends about the aspects of your job or organization that originally attracted you to it can shift those mentalities.

“You might end up reigniting other people’s passions,” she says.

From a hiring manager’s point of view, deciding that a candidate is the right fit for your workforce social culture should be a matter of whether that person is one the other workers can identify with, Steffens said. (The same can be said of a prospective employee trying to gauge whether he will fit in with a new company.) Based on his team’s research, Steffens said that a shared social bond is a crucial factor in someone’s overall sense of satisfaction and contentment.

“Hiring managers may want to look out for individuals who are likely to actively undermine a sense of unity in a team or organization and to jeopardize other members’ social identification with the workplace,” Steffens said. “Moreover, managers may also want to look out for individuals who are likely to place their own personal interests above the interests of other members of the team and the organization that they will be part of. Instead, hiring managers may want to seek individuals who are likely to be able and willing to contribute to a meaningful and healthy group life at work.”

All in all, feeling a sense of belonging with the people you work with matters. So maybe think about that the next time you’re deciding whether to attend that office happy hour.